"Something quick was in the air."

Perhaps it’s both the blessing and the curse of an interdisciplinary education, but I am forever making connections between areas of varying interests—particularly with psychology. While reading Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif,” I looked for and found various examples of the postmodern qualities of multiculturalism and the politics of identity. I watched as Roberta and Twyla engaged in an intricate dance of commonalities and boundaries, drawn together and pushing each other away as though performing a cultural tango. But I became distracted from the literary techniques when Roberta misrepresented to Twyla the incident concerning Maggie, the kitchen woman. Morrison’s point seems to be that the motivation of the heart to do something wrong or evil holds the same weightiness as actually carrying out the act. While the consequences might not externally be the same for the thought and the action, Roberta and Twyla were just as guilty of degrading the human spirit in their desire to treat Maggie wrongly as the other girls were in actually pushing her down. But while I was reading, I became particularly fascinated in the psychological implications of this “false memory.” As the two women debated about a long ago childhood memory, I was reminded of the fallibility and suggestibility of memory. Two people, observing the same event, often perceive the event differently and thus remember the incident with different focal points and biases. New experiences may even color how an event is remembered. Psychological experiments have shown over and over again that memory is not always reliable. In one study, research participants observed the same photographs of a car accident and were then asked questions about the nature of the wreck. Depending on how the question was asked (whether words like bumped or crashed were used), participants remembered the event quite differently. Thus Roberta’s different memory of the incident with Maggie would not be abnormal, and both girls would likely feel equally certain that their version of the memory was the accurate one.

“Something quick was in the air,” Toni Morrison said her short story. This simple phrase seems to capture a pervading sense in all of these short stories from more contemporary or postmodern writers. Certainly Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Sexy” feels fast paced in numerous ways. Even though the story involves a great deal of waiting—such as Miranda waiting for Sundays to come or a woman waiting for her husband to come back from London—the waiting is characterized not by quiet surrender but by impatience. The relationship between Dev and Miranda forms at a makeup counter and days later is already at a level of sexual intimacy. There is no real time for the relationship to mature or blossom, because the quick dive into what appears to be intimacy really cripples the relationship from being anything but shallow and intense. (Well, that and the reality that Dev is cheating on his wife and nothing good could come of the situation regardless). Even the little seven year old boy, Rohin, represents a kind of hurriedness to grow up. At such a young age, he is already facing the reality that his mother cries for hours at a time, that his father has gone away with a pretty woman from an airplane. He memorizes capitals of countries all over the world to compete with a classmate. Rohin is a product of globalization and the shrinking of the size of the world. Cultures interact with one another on a daily basis; seven-year-old boys know that the capital of Mali is Bamako. But I personally felt sorry that Rohin seemed to act like a miniature adult; there was little childlike energy in his fact-driven, direct way of communicating. He already has a sense of the briefness of moments and the fleeting nature of some relationships. Rohin’s comment to Miranda about their one day together being their last and his description of sexy—being in love with someone you don’t even know—in some ways show the price of the fast pace and the spreading of individuals. Sometimes, in going wide, we forget to go deep. We can communicate with people all over the globe by the hundreds, but sometimes we don’t know what’s going on in the lives of people we sit next to every day.

I found Leslie Marmon Silko’s story “Lullaby” to be heartbreaking. The only signs of peace for the characters came from interactions with nature that are slowly diminishing as we build and tear down. Sometimes the new generation of an age, whoever happens to be in the position of youth and young adulthood, criticizes the older generation for an unwillingness to change and adapt to an ever-changing world. Silko’s protagonist, Ayah, resists the changes a new society brings. But Silko poignantly shows the truth behind some of the resistance and the validity behind some of the older generation’s fear. “She hated Chato, not because he let the policeman and doctors put the screaming children in the government car, but because he had taught her to sign her name. Because it was like the old ones always told her about learning their language or any of their ways: it endangered you…All of Chato’s fine sounding English talk didn’t change things.” Ayah was only given some of the tools to “succeed” in a changing culture. She felt her concession to enter even slightly into this dominant European-American culture resulted in the loss of her children. Not willing to give up her own identity and culture, she perhaps felt that to remain completely isolated would be much better than to stick a finger into the culture and be permanently burned. In Ayah’s case, learning even something as simple as her name in English did seem to endanger her very way of life. Yet her husband, Chato, seemed to feel that he had little choice but to speak the languages of two cultures—not just phonetically but in his workplace and interactions. Silko seems to indicate that neither approach worked or spared the couple of sorrow in the end.

In Sandra Cisneros’s “Woman Hollering Creek,” I was reminded of the importance of names. At one point in the story, Cleofilas reflects upon what role her name has played in her fate, a characteristic that seems to fit nicely into the postmodern search for identity. “Everything happened to women with names like jewels. But what happened to a Cleofilas? Nothing. But a crack in the face.” The role of one’s name seems to be an ancient refrain, present even in Biblical literature where children’s names were taken very seriously and often reflected a certain truth about their life. I find it fascinating that this truth behind names still continues today. This search for identity is really “nothing new under the sun.”